The summer rain fell in a drawn-out drizzle, showing no sign of stopping even after three straight days.
Qingfeng Temple had long hung up a wooden sign announcing its closure to guests and sealing the mountain paths.
The entire rear hall sat in the most secluded spot halfway up the mountain, where nothing moved with human energy except the overgrown weeds filling the courtyard and a hundred-year-old locust tree so thick it would take two people with linked arms to circle its trunk.
Rainwater slid along the neatly arranged dark-green eaves tiles, forming a wide curtain of water that then fell onto the bluestone slabs before the steps, splashing up fine, blinding white foam.
The White-haired Daoist sat cross-legged on that roughly woven cloth cushion, his wide Daoist robe hanging loosely over a frame reduced to skin and bone.
In the bronze Boshan incense burner set before him, no ember remained—only a half-basin of cold ash, scattered pitifully by the occasional damp, chilly breeze cutting through the hall.
This wind carried the earthy smell of mud from the rear mountains and bit deep with cold when it touched the skin, yet he made no move to fetch another layer of clothing.
A worn sandalwood desk held an open copy of the Heavenly Nine Arcane Calculations, its page edges stained by years of dark yellow watermarks, giving off in the rainy weather the musty scent of ancient bamboo paper.
This ancient text, a unique copy hand-left three hundred years ago by the founding master of Qingfeng Temple at the dawn of the Great Qian Dynasty, had passed through countless generations. Its paper had grown so brittle that even the slightest touch made it flake.
The White-haired Daoist extended his withered index finger, slowly moving the pad along the holes eaten by bookworms through the paper, murmuring under his breath the obscure and difficult ancient divination verses.
His tone was calm, without rise and fall, woven into the endless sound of rain—those few phrases dealing with the fate of heaven and earth also beaten by the rain onto the blue bricks.
These were readings of the Great Qian Dynasty’s national destiny that successive temple masters had staked their lives to infer. The original black-and-white characters had stated it plainly:
The Big Dipper had shifted; the Greedy Star entered the pass. The dragon vein of Great Qian had long since dried up to the point of severance.
But an anomaly had emerged from the northern border in the person of Chen Changfeng, a rootless flame belonging to none of the five elements—metal, wood, water, fire, or earth—that had stubbornly punched a bottomless, dark cavity straight through this iron-hard block of a deadlock.
Deep within the distant clouds, muffled rumbles of thunder rolled twice through the thick dark clouds before dying out entirely, leaving only the steady tapping of raindrops against the half-open wooden window frame.
The White-haired Daoist turned a page, and the sound of his chanting stopped.
Inside the rear hall, nothing unusual stirred. The wind remained the same cold breeze; the incense ash on the desk stayed obediently stuck to the inner walls of the bronze burner. Yet in that invisible realm, a true weight pressed down without warning upon the crown of his head.
This weight could not be seen or touched, yet it was heavier than any great mountain outside Shuzhou Prefecture.
It was the law brought down by the cycles of heaven and earth—a tally the Old Man of Heaven had recorded in his ledger for a lifetime spent calculating people’s fates and knowing heaven’s decrees.
In that moment, when the rotation of yin and yang brought the mechanism to bear, the invisible guillotine hanging above his head had already fallen. This was the punishment of heaven, unavoidable after leaking celestial secrets.
The energy within his body began an irreversible withering, like a dying lamp consuming its last few drops of oil.
The Daoist did not lift even one pale eyebrow. He showed no fear in the face of death, no resentment toward heaven or man.
He simply withdrew his withered forefinger and used the back of his age-spotted hand to gently smooth out a slightly curled corner of the ancient text, making the page perfectly flat.
Then he turned his head and called out softly to the gray curtain of rain outside the door.
“Qingyu, come in.”
In a moment, the sound of someone wading through water came from the courtyard.
A small, thin figure appeared, a large bamboo hat wider than his own shoulders on his head, running all the way from the end of the corridor.
The Little Acolyte hurriedly stopped just outside the rear hall’s threshold. He scuffed his feet back and forth on the ground to shake the mud off his straw sandals, then leaned the rain-soaked hat against the wall to stand.
He wiped the water from his face, carefully stepped over the high wooden threshold, and walked properly to the book desk. He folded his hands before him and lowered his head, waiting to be called upon.
A few strands of the Little Acolyte’s hair, wet from the rain, stuck messily to his forehead.
He stood there, barely daring to breathe at full depth, careful not to disturb his Master, who usually spent his days in secluded meditation.
The White-haired Daoist looked at the boy’s restrained manner. He did not speak of the inescapable course of fate, nor of the backlash he had suffered from forcing the calculations of the northern constellations.
Instead, he reached out and pressed his fingertip onto several blurry red-inked annotations on the Heavenly Nine Arcane Calculations. Following the bamboo fiber grain of the page, he began to explain, point by point, the methods of locating dragon veins and avoiding calamity when the stars shifted.
“‘When the Greedy Star dims and a guest star offends the sovereign, it portends war and bloodshed. In the face of such a truly inauspicious pattern, one must draw earthly qi into the Bright Hall and never face north when setting up a gate.’”
The priest’s voice echoed in the cold hall. He pointed to a blurry map of mountains and water on the remnant scroll, which showed the rolling outlines of the Reclining Ox Mountains on the northern borders of Great Qian.
“Look at these array eyes. The Great Qian Dynasty has held the realm for over two hundred years, and all its dragon essence hangs by the spine of the Northern Pass Fortress.”
“Now the stars of the northern generals grow dim. Once the war banners press in from the Yin Mountains, the Northern Pass will bear the brunt of the assault.”
“At that moment, the vital energy of the world will descend into chaos. Our Qingfeng Temple, which guards the earth vein in Shu Province, will inevitably be struck by the crumbling dragon essence. You must remember—no matter how fierce the battle outside or how many die, do not open the gates for guests, and do not lightly divine fortunes or cast characters for others.”
The Little Acolyte listened with great earnestness. He understood that his Master did not casually lecture on such profound texts; these were secrets passed down through generations of temple masters, never revealed to outsiders.
He crouched down and pulled from his damp sleeve a twig of willow bark, picked up from the courtyard.
As he listened to his Master’s explanation, he traced the complex star-chart patterns on the skin of his palm.
Time slipped away in the steady patter of rain.
The ancient tome on the altar was flipped to its final pages, the bamboo paper worn and torn.
The White-haired Daoist pointed to a passage marked with cinnabar in ancient seal script. His voice remained calm as he recited the next incantation:
“When the great calamity comes, human force cannot defy it. One must sever all ties of the mortal world, seal the mountain gates, and all disciples must close their Qi seas, remaining within for three years without exit.”
The words “close their Qi seas” pierced the Little Acolyte’s ears. His willow twig stopped moving across his palm.
For a cultivator, the Qi sea was the very foundation—closing it meant cutting off the bridge between oneself and heaven and earth.
It would be no different from a farmer severing his own arms.
Only in the face of a fatal calamity that threatened to annihilate the entire sect would one resort to such a last, desperate measure.
The willow twig slipped from his slender fingers.
“Master.” The Little Acolyte’s clear eyes were shot through with red veins, the rims flushed a dark rose.
His voice trembled, barely suppressed, and his nostrils flared as he blurted out,
“The ways of escape you spoke of today… Master, are you not giving me your final instructions?”
The rain fell harder. The wind blew fine droplets through the half-open window, striking the old sandalwood altar, leaving dark stains on the brittle bamboo paper.
The White-haired Daoist did not look at the Little Acolyte’s nearly weeping face. He slowly withdrew his hand, raised his wide Daoist sleeve,
and brushed it across the page—already filled with fate’s final decrees—as though wiping away dust that wasn’t there and drying the rain that had blown in.
After this motion, he replied in a tone devoid of any ripple:
“This is merely the Way of the day.”
The Daoist’s gaze passed through the carved wooden window, toward the blinding white summer rain beyond,
watching the emerald banana leaves in the garden, bent but unbroken by the storm.
In life, between heaven and earth, there is always a road to walk to its end.
Whether it was the Great Qian Dynasty’s century-long reign or the iron hooves and swords of the Helian King’s court, all trudged on that road of slaughter and rise and fall.
The road ended at a cliff.
He, as the gatekeeper, had seen the abyss below. It was only natural to pass on the truths before the end, to follow the cycle of life and death.
The firearm brought back by Chen Changfeng, foreign to this world, had hewn open a dead end that was once ironclad.
The celestial mechanism had been thrown into chaos. What waves of shock would the Great Qian rivers and mountains yet stir among the reeds and woods? This frame of dry bones would never see it.
But he had sat so long before this fragmented chessboard, spent a lifetime in doomed calculations—only now, on the brink of death, to see the stone that broke the deadlock, a kind of unpredictable change taking root in the northern earth.
The Daoist’s parched lips moved. In the empty, chill rear hall, he asked himself in a voice only he could hear:
“When great chaos comes and the dead end is broken, is this calamity?”
Rain hammered the roof tiles. No one answered his question.
Then he shook his head, and the long-congealed heaviness on his aged face dissolved.
The wrinkles around his eyes smoothed out, layer by layer, revealing a calm that had seen through a thousand years.
He closed his eyes, and amid the enduring summer rain, from deep in his chest, he let out a long, long sigh.
“It is blessing.”
